When Ben Bradlee needed a new secretary in 1990, he asked a Catasauqua native who was working in the Washington Post newsroom.

She said no.

A bit baffled by the answer, the legendary newspaper editor asked Carol Leggett, who had been working as a part-time dictationist and later as a secretary, why she was turning down the job.

When Leggett explained that she traveled several afternoons a week to watch her son play basketball at Bucknell University and didn't want to do Bradlee a disservice by asking to leave early, he gave her an unexpected response.

"He said, 'Don't you think we can work around that?'" Leggett recalled Wednesday. "And so that was it, and I started the next day."

Leggett, 72, shared her memories from 24 years of working with Bradlee a day after he died at 93.

She described a sensitive, caring man who didn't want to be called Mr. Bradlee, who took time to chat with her Lehigh Valley visitors, and who encouraged her son when he was going through a tough time.

Leggett started working for Bradlee years after his most famous roles, overseeing the Watergate stories and pressing to publish the Pentagon Papers.

During those years, Leggett was still in the Lehigh Valley, working as a news dictationist at The Morning Call. She wrote up articles and obituaries, occasionally taking information from her father, Thomas, who was a funeral home director in Catasauqua.

Leggett and her family moved to the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington D.C. after her husband took a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. A friend pointed out a job opening at the Washington Post for the same work she had been doing in Allentown, and she joined the paper in 1976.

Over her years working as Bradlee's secretary, Leggett got to know the editor and his personality well. Everyone at the paper wanted to do a good job for Bradlee, she said, describing an atmosphere in the newsroom where reporters believed he always had their backs.

"In all those years and through so many things at the Post, I've never seen a day where he was angry or depressed or unhappy," Leggett said. "He was just a wonderful person. You always knew exactly what he thought, exactly how he felt, and he discussed it right up front and went on to the next thing."

After his retirement party in 1991, Bradlee remained a presence at the paper. He eventually scaled back his hours, and Leggett shuttled him to and from his waning work appointments. She said she thought about retiring about five years ago, but decided that if Bradlee could keep working, so could she.

Amid his active social life and high-profile professional role, Leggett said the editor remained down to Earth.

After last year receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the country's highest civilian honor, Bradlee chatted with Leggett's 13-year-old grandson, who wrote up a story on the award for his middle-school newspaper and tried on the medal.

"He just had that fun personality," Leggett said. "There was always a smile and always a twinkle in his eye."